“Yes,” Durst agreed.
By this point, Lewin had listened to 20 hours of Jarecki’s song. Jinx interviews. He reminded Durst that the millionaire had said before that there was something do bother him to come back All good things.
“Oh, kill all the dogs,” Durst recalls. (Gosling’s character kills the family dog in the film.) Lewin theorized that Durst would never hurt a dog. Durst agreed, although he couldn’t answer definitively on the subject of hurting women. (When Lewin suggested that Durst dismember his first wife, Kathie, Durst replied, “I won’t go there.”)
Although Durst’s fortune was estimated at $100 million, he admitted to applying for food stamps because he enjoyed defrauding the government. He said he had been shoplifting “since he was a kid” because he didn’t like waiting in line. “I have other things I want to do,” he said. Other children are taught to respect authority; as Durst told Lewin, “I don’t have to follow the rules.” At another point, Durst said he turned down a television network’s offer to do a special about him to paint him as a good person. In Durst’s book, that would go too far: “I never felt like I was really a good guy,” he says.
He volunteered that a former attorney did not want him to tell a Galveston, Texas, jury about his daily routine: “I’m a millionaire. I don’t have to work. I wake up most mornings and smoke.” (At another point, he tells Lewin, “I’ve smoked marijuana every day, all my life, for as long as I can remember.”)
Durst spoke indirectly about his relationships with former inmates, presumably those he met while awaiting trial for the 2003 Morris Black murder. After his arrest, Durst was released from prison. grandmother and was arrested in Pennsylvania while trying to steal a chicken sandwich. The capture astounded the minds of his prisoners.
“No prisoner can understand that: ‘You have a lot of money. Why did you get arrested?’” Technically, he was caught trying to steal lunch, a newspaper, and a Band-Aid (with $500 cash in his pocket and $37,000 in the car ). Again, why risk your freedom for such a relatively small thing?
“I can’t explain it to you,” Durst said. “I can’t explain that to the prisoners. I mean, it’s ridiculous…. I hate being a fugitive…. I am the worst fugitive the world has ever seen…. Maybe I want to get caught. I certainly can’t explain it any other way.”
Strangely, he told Lewin about learning how to dismember human bodies more effectively after he chopped up Morris Black. “The way I’m doing it is difficult,” Durst said. “Then I learned that the surgeon would cut the body the same way you cut a chicken. You go into the joint. And you cut around the joint. You get rid of all the ligaments. And then, it came out. You’re not going to go and try to cut through that damn bone like I did.”
